The Last Tribal Battle

By Diana Jean Schemo

Published: October 31, 1999

Correction Appended

For Domingo Neves de Souza, it was only a half-hour's walk to the edge of the unknown. Two years ago in September, he ventured out from the Brazilian rubber plantation where he lived to go fishing. With his two daughters and three of their friends, he pushed deep into the western Amazon, following a winding tributary of the Igarape River. Hidden in the thick surrounding forest, de Souza had long been told, were naked Indians who still set their lives to the forest's rhythms, just as they had for thousands of years: eating what the forest grew, hunting by bow and arrow. But for the 33-year-old rubber tapper, these Indians were an invisible presence, felt more than seen. Until that day, when they stepped out from the trees.

''Papa, there are people coming,'' yelled de Souza's 14-year-old daughter, Francisca. According to Francisca's later account, five Indians ran toward them, one dressed in shorts, the others naked. They carried bows and arrows, and were already reaching for them.

''Run, my girl, they'll kill you,'' de Souza cried as the arrows flew. One hit his left side. Another pierced his back. Turning around, Francisca saw the Indians closing in on her father. As she later reported, she knew right then she would never see him alive again.

An hour later, a posse of rubber tappers headed out to the spot. They found de Souza's body and saw that arrows were only part of the ordeal that had ended his life. Gashes covered his legs, chest and head; all that remained of his eyes were the dark, bloody pools of their sockets. His scalp had been sliced from his skull. The Indians that Francisca and the other children described had vanished, as if soaked back into the forest. But who could they be? Were the killers really indios bravos -- wild Indians'' -- as the locals called isolated tribesmen? Or had the children's imaginations spun out of control? The rain forest grows rumors along with species, and stories multiplied.

These stories eventually reached the ears of Sydney Possuelo, the Brazilian Government's leading authority on isolated Indians. Possuelo soon traveled to the area where the murder occurred, in the far western state of Acre -- but not to solve the crime. For one thing, he was no police detective. What's more, Possuelo had little sympathy for ambushed pioneers; he knew that from Brazil's first days white settlers had ruthlessly slaughtered Indians, burning their villages and abducting their children to work as slaves. The reason he went to Acre was this: a murder by unclothed Indians has often been the first sign of a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe. If isolated people were indeed hiding nearby in the forest, Possuelo wanted to find them -- but not to punish them. He wanted to offer the tribe protection, for as long as possible, from the modern world.

Anthropologists believe the Amazon shelters the world's largest number of still-isolated Indians. (The Pacific island of New Guinea is a distant second.) Since the 1970's, Brazil's Government has counted 50 sites that reveal signs of indigenous settlement -- many spotted by canvassing the rain forest from the air -- though no known tribes are thought to inhabit those particular areas. Possuelo says that these traces were left by approximately 15 tribes of the rain forest that have never been studied or, in some instances, even named by scholars.

By definition, little is known about isolated Indians. Their relics surface in the most remote stretches of the Amazon, hundreds of miles from the nearest roads. It is not known whether the tribes fled to these regions as Brazilians claimed more of the countryside or whether they were always there. Some tribes, like the Igarape Umere, in the state of Rondnia, have turned up like the straggling survivors of a shipwreck, with only a handful of members left. By contrast, the Korubu of the Javari Valley reach into the hundreds.

Standing between these tribes and the rest of the world is Possuelo, 59, who has pinpointed seven new tribes in his 40 years as a sertanista, the peculiarly Brazilian occupation of Indian tracker. He can look at a footprint in the forest and tell instantly whether it belongs to a forest Indian or a Brazilian settler by the gap between the first two toes: Indians always walk barefoot, so the big and middle toes splay from repeatedly gripping the earth. Over the years, his own foot has come to resemble those of the Indians. But if Possuelo is the world's link to the mysterious tribes of the rain forest, he is also the most formidable obstacle to the rest of the planet's ever knowing them.

As director of the Indian protection agency's department of isolated Indians, Possuelo has almost single-handedly redefined his agency's traditional role. In the past, the agency, known as Funai, aggressively paved the way for white development of regions occupied by indigenous peoples. But Possuelo argues that virtually every tribe touched by Brazilian society has been destroyed as a result. Rather than flourishing from the medical and technological advances civilization could offer, they have withered from disease, slavery, alcohol consumption and the greed of Brazilians. The numbers bear Possuelo out: the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro's landmark book, ''Indians and Civilization,'' concluded that 100 Indian nations disappeared in Brazil between 1900 and 1970, the year his book was published. When Europeans first reached Brazil about 500 years ago, estimates of the Indian population ran from one to six million. It is now 300,000.

Diana Jean Schemo, a reporter for The Times, is the former chief of The Times's Rio de Janeiro bureau. Her most recent article for the Magazine was about life in Rio's slums.

Correction: December 19, 1999, Sunday A picture caption on Oct. 31 with an article about the Korubu, an isolated Indian tribe in the Brazilian rain forest, referred incorrectly to a child whose hair was being cut with a reed. A reader pointed out several weeks later that the child was a girl.